by Mary Balogh
He had always ended up diving into the river, for he had never quite overcome his terror of climbing down the tree.
Besides, diving was a thrilling, dangerous thing to do.
It was a long time since he was last here. He had come for a few years, even after he went away to school, but for some unremembered reason he had stopped, and then he had forgotten all about this place. Until today, that was, when he had been wandering aimlessly about the perimeter of his father’s park.
Actually it was quite rare for him to be at home. He was away at school most of the time, and during holidays he was often invited to spend a few weeks with school friends at their country homes. And his parents—his father anyway—liked to travel and took him all over the British Isles during his holidays—and even to Europe when a lull in the wars allowed foreign travel.
It felt good to be home.
He dozed off for a minute or two, but it was not a deep sleep. He was aware of the world around him at the same time as he floated pleasantly on the surface of a fuzzy slumber. He heard the horse approaching.
He woke up fully and opened his eyes.
What now? Should he lie quietly here and hope horse and rider would pass on by without seeing him, as would probably happen? Or should he make a dive for the river and the safety of his own side of it?
That latter course of action would have been a great indignity even to his childhood self. It was unthinkable to his almost-adult pride. Besides, he was fully clothed, having crossed the river higher up, where it was narrower and there were enough large stones embedded in it to form a precarious sort of bridge.
He stayed where he was and relaxed into what he hoped would look like nonchalance if he was caught.
The horse drew closer, and closer yet. And then stopped.
Drat it, he had been spotted.
Reggie sucked on his grass stem and gazed up into the branches of the tree as though he were deaf.
“Oh,” a female voice said, sounding both surprised and delighted. “Hello.”
He knew immediately who she was, and it came to him in a rush that he had stopped coming here when she had. She had not been caught here with him—a disaster that would have had dire consequences for both of them—but she had been caught farther from the house than she was allowed to go alone, even though she must have been six or seven at the time. She had been more carefully guarded after that.
They had been childhood friends. They had not met often, it was true, but they had met. At first he had barely tolerated her but had insulted and teased and scowled at her. It had seemed beneath his eight-year-old dignity, after all, to have a five-year-old girl as a friend. But she had been a plucky, cheerful little thing—and a daring one too. Though she had never dived into the river, purely for the reason that she would get her hair wet and so betray her truancy when she returned home, she had climbed both up and down the oak tree and joined in all his games. She had steadfastly refused to be a damsel in distress, though. She had been his right-hand man in all his exploits. She had sometimes demanded that he be her right-hand man, but she had never won those battles. He had taught her to fish, and she had had a knack for catching them. Her gender had always betrayed her when she reeled them in, though. She had always detached the hook with swift tenderness and placed the fish gently back in the water. When he had jeered at her, she had stuck out her tongue at him and crossed her eyes.
He sat up now and turned toward her.
“You have managed to escape all your nurses?” he asked with contempt in his voice.
“You are still a trespasser?” she countered haughtily.
She was dressed very fashionably in a bright blue riding habit with an absurd little hat sitting on her blond curls and tipped over one eyebrow. She was as thin as a reed, and very pretty if one liked flat-chested chits. Reggie did not. He liked just the opposite.
“You are going to run and tell tales to Papa?” he asked her.
“He would wonder if I had discovered it while gazing into a crystal ball in the schoolroom,” she said. “I would not tell him anyway, even if I could do it without betraying myself. I am not a tattle-tale. What are you doing here?”
“Eating your father’s grass,” he said, tossing the blade aside, “and enjoying the solitude. At least, I was enjoying it.”
“I saw you at church last Sunday,” she told him.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to look,” he said.
Her pert little nose had been stuck in the air as she had pointedly not looked his way.
“I did not look,” she said. “I heard you, singing the hymns. Off key.”
Which was a horrible bouncer. He had not opened his mouth.
“You did not,” he said and scowled at her.
“All the other girls were looking at you,” she said. “They think you are ever so gorgeous.”
She laughed, and it was a bright, merry sound, not the sort of female giggle that grated on male ears.
“As long as you don’t,” he said.
“I would think not,” she said tartly. “If you keep looking at people like that, you are going to grow into Mr. Gruff-and-Grim by the time you are twenty, and no one will think you gorgeous at all. Help me down.”
It was an order issued with the aristocratic assumption that he would run to obey.
“Maybe,” he said rudely, “I don’t want your company.”
“Then go back to your own park,” she said. “Help me down.”
He got to his feet and strolled reluctantly toward her. If he remembered correctly, she was three years younger than he. What self-respecting man of his age was interested in a twelve-year-old?
But she was not quite flat-chested, he discovered when he lifted her down from her sidesaddle. Her breasts were budding. They were almost invisible to the eye, at least through the fabric of her habit. But he could feel them when she came hurtling downward rather too fast and rubbed against him all the way to the ground.
“Oops,” she said and laughed.
“Oops,” he said simultaneously and… dash it all, he hoped he was not blushing. He scowled again.
She was a tiny little thing. She reached barely to his shoulder. Of course, he had had a growth spurt in the last three or four months. If she was going to have one, it had not happened yet. She looked like a child, even if she did not quite feel like one.
Dash it, but the fellows at school would pour endless ridicule upon him if they could see him now, spending a precious holiday afternoon with a stick of a girl.
“I have not been here for ages,” she said.
“Me neither.”
“You have not been diving today,” she said. “Your hair is dry.”
“Diving out of trees is for children“ he said.
“And you are not a child any longer,” she said tipping her head to one side so that the feather in her little hat brushed one of her shoulders. “No, I can see you are not. And you are not a pirate or a sea captain or a Viking warrior any longer. Those were good days, were they not? Come and sit down again. Tell me about yourself.”
“The horse?” he said, indicating it.
“Pegasus?” she said and laughed. “Have you heard a less imaginative name for a horse? Or a less suitable one? He is as meek as a mouse. He will graze quietly here until I am ready to go home.”
And she sat down on the grass close to the bank, removed the pins from her hat and tossed it aside, raised her knees, and arranged her skirts about her legs before clasping her arms about them. She rested one cheek against her knees and gazed across at him as he sat cross-legged beside her.
“I have missed those days when we were children,” she said. “I have missed you, Reggie.”
She sounded wistful. How could he tell her that he had forgotten all about those days and about her until she had come riding up?
Her lips curved into a smile and her eyes danced with merriment.
“You had forgotten my very existence, had you not?” she said. “Boys are h
orrid, careless creatures. But then, of course, you have more with which to fill your heads than we do. You go to school, and I daresay you have dozens of friends. You must have, for sometimes your mama and papa are here and you are not even though it is between school terms. Tell me about school.”
He shrugged.
“It is a crashing bore,” he said.
She tutted. “There is something about boys,” she said, “that makes them think it is unmanly to show any feelings other than scorn and irritation or any enthusiasm for anything. It is a very unattractive trait.”
“I am not trying to attract you,” he said.
There was a short silence.
“Do you want me to go away?” she asked. “I will if you wish. Even though it is you who are trespassing.”
He turned his head to look at her. She really was a pretty little thing. At this moment she was all large, wistful blue eyes.
“Anna,” he said, and then felt very* foolish because he had nothing else to say. He had forgotten that he used to call her that because Annabelle seemed altogether too girly.
She smiled.
“You are the only person who has ever called me that,” she said. “Do you remember the day I climbed up the tree and must have taken an hour or more to climb down again? I have never been more terrified in my life.”
He did remember actually. He remembered wondering, with knees that threatened to knock together, if he was going to have to be a real-life hero and climb back up to her rescue. But she had done it on her own without once demanding or pleading for assistance.
“I remember,” he said.
“You told me I had pluck,” she said. “It was the loveliest compliment I had ever been paid. Perhaps it still is.”
She laughed.
“You used to catch fish,” he said, “and throw them back in. Just like a girl.”
“I am a girl,” she said, and their eyes locked.
He felt a return of that discomfort he had felt when he lifted her awkwardly from her horse and felt her body rub along his as she descended. A slight hotness. A slight breathlessness.
Over a shapeless girl who stuck her nose in the air when she saw him at church.
There was a spot of color in her left cheek, the only one that was visible to him. It suggested that she was suddenly uncomfortable too.
“I’ll race you to the top of the tree,” she said.
“That’s children’s stuff,” he said scornfully.
But she had jumped to her feet and darted to the oak tree. She started to climb, and he had a brief view of thin legs encased in riding boots and the white shift beneath her riding habit.
He watched her for a few moments. He hoped she was not going to get stuck halfway up or, worse, at the top. He hoped she was not going to wail down at him to come to her rescue.
But he knew she would not. She would rescue herself. He sensed that she had not changed in that way.
He despised himself for still liking her.
How the fellows would laugh.
He went after her.
They climbed in silence for a while, until she started to laugh—a light, exuberant sound. He laughed too and found a different route to the top so that he could overtake her.
They met well above the branches where they had played as young children. She eased herself down to a sitting position between the trunk and a slightly upward-sloping branch, and he stood on a branch to one side of hers, one arm wrapped about the trunk. They were enclosed by wood and leaves. Beyond there was the blue of the sky and the answering blue of the river below.
“Are you scared?” she asked him.
“No.”
“Liar!”
“Are you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Liar!”
They both snorted at the silliness, and he lowered himself gingerly until he was sitting on his branch, his knees drawn up. Their shoulders almost touched.
“How are we going to get down?” she asked, and laughed again.
“Perhaps we will have to live the rest of our lives up here,” he said.
“I hope not,” she told him. “If I am not back within the hour there is going to be one very anxious groom in our stables. He is supposed to ride behind me at all times, but I have persuaded him that he does not need to do so when I have promised not to leave the park. I think he chooses to believe the suggestion came from my father but suspects it did not.”
He turned his head and looked at her profile. She still had a child’s face. Though that was not quite right. She looked different from the round-cheeked little girl with whom he used to play. She was going to be a beautiful woman when she had grown a bit and developed breasts and hips and all their accompanying curves. She would probably marry a duke or a marquess or an earl. Perhaps even a prince.
Sometimes he resented the fact that he was not of her class and never would be for all his schooling and his fathers wealth.
Not that he wanted her to marry him.
She turned her head too, and he was caught gazing at her.
She smiled.
“Reggie,” she said, “tell me about school. Tell me about you. I have heaps of cousins and friends and acquaintances. But I have never forgotten you.”
It amazed him that she would so easily open herself to rejection and scorn. He would never admit such a thing to her, even if it were true. Perhaps that was one fundamental difference between males and females.
But… she had never forgotten him?
“School is jolly good fun, actually,” he said.
“Is it?”
And he found himself telling her stories of school and the masters and his fellow pupils. He chose anecdotes that would make her laugh. He told her about his travels with his parents, about the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands and Mount Snowdon and Harlech Castle in North Wales. He told her about the relatives they visited in the north of England, more numerous, it seemed, than the stars in the sky, all loud and boisterous and affectionate.
And she told him about her governess and her studies and her visits to relatives at their various country homes and to Bath and Bristol. She had him chuckling and even laughing aloud at some of the stories she told.
“Oh, Reggie,” she said at last, “it is lovely to see you again. I have had more fun this afternoon than I have had all summer.”
He could hardly say the same. He had spent a few weeks with one particularly jolly school chum in Cornwall. He had sailed and swum in the sea and climbed cliffs—up, not down—and ridden across rugged country and played cricket and done a dozen and one other exciting things.
“Will you come again?” he asked.
“Will you?”
“I asked first,” he said. And then, in a burst of nobility, “But I will answer first. Yes, I will come again.”
“Tomorrow?” she said.
“Perhaps,” he said. “If nothing else is planned, or if it does not rain, or if I feel like it.”
“Well, I won’t come here ever again,” she cried, and with a wicked laugh she swung her legs over the branch and began to descend.
She went down as though she had not a nervous bone in her body. She laughed all the way down.
Reggie, feeling foolish and not a little annoyed, went gingerly after her. He went far faster than he would have done if he had been alone. He expelled a long, silent breath when his feet were safely on the ground.
“You must help me mount Pegasus,” she said. “If there were a mounting block here I could do it myself, but there is not.”
She was back to aristocratic presumption. She did not ask. She told.
“Yes, miss, whatever you say, miss,” he said, and he pulled humbly on his forelock.
She turned her head to look at him.
“That is what is different,” she said. “It has been puzzling me all the time. You just spoke in your lovely accent again, as you used to do. All the rest of the time you have spoken like everyone else I know. Do help me up or I will
be late.”
His implied complaint and insult had completely escaped her. All she had noticed was that he had acquired an upper-class accent.
He cupped his hands when she had hold of the horse, and she set one small boot in them so that he could hoist her upward. She was as light as a feather.
She looked down at him when she was settled in her sidesaddle, the reins gathered in one hand.
“Reggie,” she said, “I will come again. Maybe not tomorrow, but I will come.”
And she reached down with her free hand and cupped his cheek with it.
He felt, foolishly, as if he had been scalded. He held his hand to his cheek as he watched her ride away—a stick of a girl with proud bearing and—no hat.
“Hey, Anna,” he called, and he swept it up and ran to take it to her—just like a lackey.
“Oh, thank you, Reggie,” she said as she took it and settled it somehow on her curls. “Someone would have noticed. You are my knight in shining armor.”
And off she rode again.
A knight in shining armor indeed! Cliché. Child’s stuff.
But he felt absurdly pleased.
5
Reggie and his parents were not invited to dine at Havercroft House on the evening of the engagement ball, though there was a dinner for a number of Havercroft’s relatives and inner circle of friends. One of Reggie’s acquaintances had told him of it.
Reggie was not surprised that they had been excluded. What if his mother slurped her soup, after all, or his father tucked his napkin into the top of his cravat? What if he should use his dessert spoon for the fish course or the butter knife to hack at his beef?
Instead they were to attend only the ball, and Havercroft was to propose a toast to his daughter and her betrothed during supper. They were to stand in the receiving line too, something Havercroft must deplore but could hardly avoid without raising eyebrows throughout the ton.